Council expected to pass Lyft deal

The City Council is expected to approve on Thursday a pilot program that would allow ride-hailing firm Lyft to soon restart operations here under a nine-month pilot program.

Mayor Ivy Taylor, who directed City Manager Sheryl Sculley in June to develop a framework for a test program that would return the ride-hailing companies to San Antonio, said Wednesday she’s confident the majority of the council supports the proposal.

She appointed Councilman Roberto Treviño to represent the council in meetings with Lyft and Uber, known in San Antonio as “transportation network companies.” His charge was to find a plan palatable to both the council and the companies so they could restart operations here.

“We’ve been communicating with the council members about Lyft, and Councilman Treviño is the one who’s been leading this,” Taylor said. “He’s had more meetings with the council member than I have. But I’ve also been communicating with them.”

The Lyft proposal would allow drivers to voluntarily go through the city’s fingerprint background check and then note in their profiles that they’ve passed the city’s background check. Lyft will continue to run its drivers through its own background check system.

The proposal, officials say, will give consumers the choice of hailing a Lyft driver who has passed the fingerprint background check if that’s their desire.

Lyft and Uber left San Antonio April 1, when an ordinance took effect that some say was designed to keep them out of the market here.

The single largest point of contention centered on background checks. The city had demanded fingerprint checks, and the TNCs said their third-party checks based on Social Security numbers were superior.

This week, following the city’s announcement of a deal with Lyft, the taxicab industry spent tens of thousands of dollars on television, radio and newspaper advertisements in an attempt to spike the proposed pilot program, records show.

The industry has targeted public safety and asserts that passengers aren’t safe in ride-hailing vehicles. Federal Communications Commission records show that Yellow Cab San Antonio’s John Bouloubasis and Texas Rides for Hire spent more than $56,000 on ads running this week on WOAI and KENS.

In a San Antonio Express-News full-page advertisement, Bouloubasis’ group asks “ It’s midnight in San Antonio — do you know who’s driving your daughter home?” The ad then encourages readers to call Taylor and the City Council, listing their photos and telephone numbers.

The full-court press appears to have little effect on Taylor, who originally supported the ordinance backed by the taxi industry.

“I’m not really concerned about the taxi industry because this is not about them,” Taylor said. “This is about us creating a pilot framework for our transportation-network companies to operate safely in San Antonio. Of course, we want to have a level playing field, but we also recognize that competition is good. So the taxis, for me, certainly aren’t driving the conversation.”

In recent months, Taylor has been meeting with leaders of TechBloc, a local group of tech-industry leaders that has pushed to bring ride-hailing back to San Antonio. Taylor said she’s seen a “whole narrative” in San Antonio that uses ride-hailing as a barometer of success for a city’s progress.

“I wouldn’t have necessarily characterized it in that way, but it is a service that San Antonians want to see, and I certainly want to be responsive to constituent concerns,” she said. “And if folks are able to access this service in most major American cities, I think certainly San Antonio wants to be in that playing field, so that’s the way I look at it.”

Councilman Ron Nirenberg, who has long been a supporter of ride-hailing, said he agrees that public safety is a priority issue. His perspective, however, is from a different angle. Nirenberg says the ride-hailing companies will help public safety by reducing the number of drunk-driving incidents on city streets.

The plan, he predicted, will pass “with flying colors — because the mayor and Councilman Treviño have done a good job bridging the gap between ideologies on the council.”

Last week, Bouloubasis chided the city’s proposed pilot program, saying it “could have a direct and dangerous consequence” on consumers.

How quickly the council might take up the Uber proposal is unclear. It appears to have a far less support than the Lyft program.

Uber’s proposal would add language to a single section of the city’s negotiated agreement with Lyft, giving it the option to notify customers that its drivers are not fingerprinted for background checks. Under the Lyft proposal, drivers would voluntarily have the city’s fingerprint background check conducted, and they would then post a city-issued identification number on their driver profiles, indicating that they’d passed the check.

Under the Lyft proposal, the company would give its drivers “the option to identify whether the TNC operator (1) has voluntarily undergone and passed a criminal background check as approved by the city; and (2) is a military veteran or active member of the military.”

Uber’s proposal piggybacks on that language, adding another option for itself: “the TNC shall (1) provide an in-app notice to riders in San Antonio that TNC operators have been screened by a nationally accredited background check service; and (2) conduct outreach to the military community with the goal of recruiting driver-partners.”

Uber sent its proposal to the city late Tuesday, and council members received the document Wednesday afternoon, just before starting a meeting on the fiscal year 2016 budget.

After 10 years covering City Hall for the San Antonio Express-News, Baugh moved into the environment beat in February 2019.

A native of the Alamo City, Baugh was hired as a suburban-cities reporter at his hometown newspaper in 2006.

He began his newspaper career at the Denton Record-Chronicle while working on a master's degree in journalism at the University of North Texas and later covered Texas A&M University for The Eagle in College Station. He's covered various facets of government and politics ever since.

Baugh has previously written about public housing, county government and transportation for the Express-News.